Rioters clashed with police Saturday night on the fifth day of unrest following the fatal police shooting of a 17-year-old boy in a Paris suburb, while a local mayor said he was the victim of an assassination attempt by protestors.
Police had arrested 719 people nationwide by the early hours of Sunday, after a deployment of 45,000 officers and “gendarmes” — the French equivalent of the national guard — in an attempt to control crowds in the quickly unfolding crisis, the French interior ministry said.
Some 45 police officers and gendarmes were injured overnight, but “their resolute action, coordinated by the prefects, ensured a calmer night,” the ministry said.
More than 1,300 people were arrested on Friday, suggesting the protests are dying down.
But the mayor of the Paris suburb of l’Hay-les-Roses said that a burning car hit his home in injuring his wife and one of their children, in an attack he described as an “assassination attempt.”
“At 1:30 a.m., while I was at the town hall as I had been for the past 3 nights, individuals rammed a car into my home before setting it on fire to burn down my house, where my wife and two young children were sleeping,” Mayor Vincent Jeanbrun tweeted early Sunday.
“My wife and one of my children were injured when they tried to protect themselves and escape the assailants. It was an unspeakable, cowardly assassination attempt,” he said.
Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin echoed the description of the event as an attempted assassination on Sunday morning, and said on Twitter that “major judicial police resources” had been mobilized for an investigation.
July 1, 202301:29
Police stayed away from the funeral of 17-year-old Nahel in Nanterre Saturday. He was buried in a hilltop ceremony in the Paris suburb, where hundred lined the road to pay tribute as his white casket was carried from a mosque to the burial ground, the Associated Press reported.
Nahel, identified only by his first name, was killed by a single shot from a police officer during a traffic stop on Tuesday morning.
The legal team representing the teenager’s family hasn’t said if it believes race was a factor in the shooting. But the event has stirred long-simmering tensions between French authorities and young people living in disadvantaged, multicultural neighborhoods in French cities.
Two helicopters patrolled the skies of the southern port city of Marseille on Saturday night, and gendarmes came equipped with an armoured vehicle to support local security forces, the Bouches-du-Rhône police force said in a series of Twitter updates Sunday morning. They added that 71 people had been arrested overnight.
Three commercial centers in the north of Marseilles city’s north were looted, though security forces were able to disperse crowds. Businesses spent the day boarding up; mass gatherings were prohibited overnight and public transportation services shut down by 6 p.m. local, according to social media updates from the city of Marseille and local police.
The protests are fueling a diplomatic crisis for French president Emmanuel Macron as Paris gears up to host the summer Olympics in 2024. The facade of the aquatics training center was damaged in protests Thursday, Reuters reported, and buses parked near the construction site set on fire.
On Friday Macron decided to postpone a state visit to Germany — the first by a French president in 23 years — according to a statement on the German presidency website.
An Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson asked the French government and police to “take into account the demands of the protesters while exercising restraint and avoiding violence,” the ministry said on Twitter Saturday.
Some have called on the president to declare a state of emergency, including the far-right National Rally Party and its parliamentary leader Marine Le Pen who said one should be declared “without further delay.”
In 2005, then-president Nicolas Sarkozy declared a state of emergency after nine days of intense riots following the death of two teenagers by electrocution, as they hid from a police chase in an electricity substation. Two further weeks of clashes followed in their home suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois on the outskirts of Paris and across the country, in the worst civil unrest in recent French history.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
